Additional note - My friends and I have been setting ourselves to "Normal," while setting the AI to "Major Bonus" - however, this causes them to receive both a +3 and +4 bonus.

If the majority of the lobby wants to play on standard difficulty against "Deity" opponents, is this the correct way to set this up?

Great mod! Out of curiosity, why does it default to low penalty in multiplayer games?

Hey guys, haven't been very active here for some time. But I want to address some questions.

@Arrow interesting observations. I won't update this mod for the values you use, because your version already covers that area, and it's nice to have options :)

@Veggie TOMlette I added a screenshot of the spreadsheet I use as the cover at for this mod. I know it's not very pretty, but I'm lazy :P

Can you give a breakdown of what actually changes for each difficulty setting? I'm playing on Major Penalty but I have no idea what that's actually doing to my civ

Hey @babyyarr0w, any chance you could let us borrow your version? or help me modify this myself? We're having the exact same issues with fine tuning the difficulty.

(3 of 3) As a result of these observations I have made some edits to your mod on my local files and have been messing around with the different values to better find that sweet spot such that all of the bonuses and penalties available on game start can be used to account for different skill levels instead of only really being able to use low penalty through medium bonus. I still have a bit of playing around to do but once I think I have found that sweet spot to allow more usability on all of available penalties and bonuses I would like to upload to the workshop for others to use. I understand my idea is more focused on allowing new players to game with experienced players and yours is strictly focused on applying AI bonuses and penalties to human players, but as I am using your mod for inspiration I'd like to get your blessing before I do that and eventually tag you on an upload. Is this cool with you?

(2 of 3) We have however ran into an issue after awhile - the differences between some of the bonuses and penalties are a bit too wide for us to truly find that sweet spot for some of the people in our friend group playing. Sometimes it feels as if the guy with the higher bonuses gets too much of a bonus and the guy with the penalty gets too much of a penalty. The biggest issue I think there is - is that your mod values production as double the value of other yields in the same way gold is valued doubly. The change in percentages for each level of bonus or penalty is 7% per except for gold and production which is doubled. I understand gold doubling, but the production doubling really makes deviating beyond low penalty basically unplayable for said person especially if there are people with medium bonuses or higher in the match.

(1 of 3) Hey Zobtzler! My friends and I love your mod. Probably the best mod for the purposes of allowing new players to play with experienced players at the moment and keep people playing civ in multiplayer without feeling like its too unbalanced and impossible to win against experienced players.

No worries. The low bonus receives 8%, since MEDIUM PENALTY is the default value in the code (no idea why), it adds 9 EXTRA per level going up (these are not applied for penalties, there's another modifier for that, MEDIUM PENALTY is just what the code uses for everything).

So it is -19 for medium penalty, which is NOT applied since it's the wrong modifier
-10 for low penalty, which is NOT applied since it's the wrong modifier
-1 for normal, which is NOT applied since it's the wrong modifier
+8 for low bonus, which IS applied
+17 for medium bonus, which IS applied
+26 for large bonus, which IS applied
+35 for major bonus, which IS applied

So essentially, you have to centralize everything from the MEDIUM PENALTY difficulty, and then make sure the EXTRA value is set so it applies the correct value for each level of difficulty and modifier

@Zobtzler Thanks for your reply. Just to clarify, does that mean a person on low bonus receiving a "-19" has all their tech costs reduced by 19 science, or perhaps 19%?
How is the value interpreted. If I changed it to -10 for our friend group, would it be less of a bonus or more, and by how much? Does this scale throughout the game?

Just want to say, amazing work on the mod, sorry to be difficult!

@TemporalFire. Lovely! The prince difficulty is "Normal". The -19 and 9 extra are just starting values and by how much the bonus should deviate from difficulty to difficulty. The reason for the weird number is cause the "default difficulty" according to how the code starts assigning values etc isn't necessarily in the middle

I really love this mod idea. I'm one of the players in our friend group that needs a handicap. I have a few questions though.
What's the equivalent difficulty for the normal AI on Prince? We've tried a few and they always seem to be nerfed a fair amount.

Also, can you briefly explain how the values are interpreted here? What does a -19 mean? How does Extra affect things. I'm hoping to tweak some of the values for our friend group to make it more fair for us.
<ModifierId>ZOB_LOW_BONUS_SCIENCE_SCALING</ModifierId>
<Name>Amount</Name>
<Type>LinearScaleFromDefaultHandicap</Type>
<Value>-19</Value>
<Extra>9</Extra>

Is this mod up today? Does it still work with the latest version?

I don't know why I didn't think to test that before posting. I guess I haven't played as much Mali as I thought because I just ran a couple of single-player games and it looks like the problem exists even without the use of this mod. Sorry for the false alarm!

> I'm a Deity player and it's really nice to have a way to handicap myself to play with my casual friends. Thank you for making it!

Thank you. I'm very happy to know that it's coming to good use :D

> it doesn't seem like policy cards like Agoge (+50% production for Ancient/Classical units) or Ilkum (+30% production for Builders) are working when I'm using the mod.

Is it the same when you don't run the mod? AFAIK my code shouldn't modify anything that interferes with that.

Hey, I wanted to report a potential bug here--playing as Mali, it doesn't seem like policy cards like Agoge (+50% production for Ancient/Classical units) or Ilkum (+30% production for Builders) are working when I'm using the mod. I have myself set to Major Penalty and the -47% shows up in my production, but my production cards do nothing.

That said, I really appreciate this mod! I'm a Deity player and it's really nice to have a way to handicap myself to play with my casual friends. Thank you for making it!

Late reply, but I think I haven't been clear enough in my usage of "setback".

You are correct that the human modifiers in prince through diety are unchanged in vanilla civ 6, but not here.

My usage of "setback" in this case is meant to be relative.

So the major penalty difficulty setback is meant to be interpreted as the relative setback a human player would get compared to the AI on diety

Hey,
according to the Difficulty Level page in the Civ 6 wiki there are litereally NO human setbacks between prince an deity (only AI bonuses).
So is there actually anything different for all the penalties in your mod?

I've tried to but steam marks the link as potentially malicious

could you possibly give a spreed sheet of all the bonuses and penalties changes

For my group it's the science/culture/production/gold/faith bonuses - something like half of the "Low Bonus" boosts (perhaps "Slight Bonus"?) would be about right for us. Combat/XP bonuses don't seem to be an issue. Appreciate you considering it!

@trickydisko You could edit the values, but it's a bit tricky. If people in general would want me to balance it out a bit more I could do that. What is it that is too OP at the moment?

This is a really helpful mod, thanks - it's made multiplayer fun for everyone in the group I play with! My group is finding the bonus levels quite far apart to achieve a balance - for one they still need a bit of a bonus but low seems a bit too big, for another they need more than low but medium is too much. Could I edit my local copy of the mod to adjust the values to suit my group better? Are all the values in a single XML file? Thanks for any help/advice.

Yes, you have to turn it off for singleplayer

Really great mod, I appreciate your work. However it'd be great if it didn't effect singleplayer difficulties. Do I have to turn this mod off every time I play singleplayer mode?

You'd have to create a multiplayer match, with no timers, and only you as a player for that to work. Sure, there's probably a way to implement a proper SP solution, but that's too much work for something that the workaround I just described fixes for you with minor issues (I think)

Would it be possible to enable this for single player, if I want AI opponents of different strength levels?

@Gartrude do you have any other mods installed? Could you try to replicate it?

Thank you mate. Exactly what I was looking for to ease a friend into a veteran multiplayer match.
I shall award you a unicorn. May he be your best friend.

The main issue I've come across is on the difficulties where the player has an advantage, the extra settlers and builders are unable to build/settle I've noticed also that sometimes builders are called settlers and vice versa and are unable to do their tasks.

Is there something that isn't working, or is there something that needs tweaking? I'll update the mod if there are issue with it.

Just wanted to say this mod is my favourite and is essential to me in playing Civ. I think you've done magnificently with this.
Was wondering if you're still updating.